OSLO - A growing sense of urgency is pushing world leaders to agree a new treaty to fight climate change but the U.S. presidential election might still foil hopes of a deal by the end of 2009, experts told a Reuters summit.
Many countries, including the United States and its main industrial allies in the Group of Eight, want a climate pact agreed by the end of 2009 to help slow warming that may bring more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas.
"There is a sense of urgency," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of the mood among world leaders facing with mounting evidence of global warming. But he said not all were ready to sign up to a 2009 deadline.
Investors want to know long-term rules as soon as possible to decide whether there will be penalties on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, for instance, or tax breaks for windmills.
The United Nations wants a deal in place by the end of 2009 to give three years for ratification by national parliaments before the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan for fighting global warming until 2012.
Many experts told a Reuters Environment Summit this week that 2009 was possible but talks would slip because of factors including the U.S. presidential election in 2008 and the complexity of dividing curbs between rich and poor.
"There's every reason to believe in the possibility" of a deal by the end of 2009, said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme.
"A lot will hinge on essentially what happens in the United States, and there we have every reason to believe that the position of he United States over the next few years will not be the same as it was," he said.
President George W. Bush decided in 2001 against implementing the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol in a break with most of his industrial allies except Australia.
